Schooling

Although the terminology remains unavoidable, there is technically no longer any such thing as a state secondary school in England, and there will soon be no such thing as a state primary school, either. They are all contractors. No one has taken to the streets to save English state education. Yet Labour is reviving its perennial internal crowdpleaser, the imposition of VAT on school fees. That one is never going to happen, because the promise of it will always be too useful for when Labour activists started to ask what their party was actually for.

Even without the VAT, the fees for commercial schools are far beyond the reach of anyone in the middle of anything. You can go to school for free in this country, and most people do. But this needless expense makes very affluent people feel as if they are struggling, since they really do have to make certain sacrifices, by their own standards, in order to meet it. In turn, that makes them very vocal against, for example, a modest increase in their own direct taxation.

School fees corrupt the parliamentary process. To pay them, the Conservatives insist that an MP has to be paid a gargantuan salary. They then take other work as well, but by then the meeting of their initial demand has drawn other, mostly Labour, candidates who have been attracted by the money. Plenty of people would happily become Labour MPs for £40,000 per annum, and a certain number would do it for half that, which would still be more than many people had to live on even in London. They would never get near it, though. People with pound signs in their eyes also have very sharp elbows. But the present salary is the existing rate for the job. The principles of trade unionism demand that everyone who was entitled to it take it in full, and that it not be cut, either in absolute terms or by being allowed to fall behind inflation. Level up, not down.

The condition of a commercial school's continuing charitable status, including its exemption from VAT, should be its having been adjudged good or better by the same body, and using the same criteria, as for state schools, with the reports published, and with the value-added measure applied, thereby requiring those schools to have demonstrated how they had improved pupils' abilities.

But while we are seeking to make the world better, then we still have to live in it as it is. It is not hypocritical to do so as best we can. The hypocrites are the highly activist Education Ministers, usually Conservatives, who buy their own children out of the practical application and implications of their policies. Their hypocrisy is never, ever called out. Well, it would certainly be called out by me.

And it must be said that the schools that they favour do regularly provide left-wing figures with a platform that they are seldom or never afforded by the schools of the municipal Labour Right. The Left and the working class, and perhaps especially the rural working class, need to bypass both the municipal Labour Right and the Liberal Establishment both in education and in the media. The EU referendum and the 2019 General Election have confirmed that the workers, and not the liberal bourgeoisie, are now the key swing voters who deserve direct representation on local public bodies, on national public bodies, in the media, and at the intersection of the public and media sectors.

It is in the running of state schools that the Liberal Establishment in academia and the media meets the right-wing Labour machine in local government. Jeremy Corbyn used to turn down invitations to speak at public schools, although I do not know whether he still would. George Galloway regularly accepts them. Yet it is impossible to imagine that a state school might offer a platform to anyone on the Left.

We ought to be bypassing the weedy brains of the Liberal Establishment and the brainless brawn of the municipal Labour Right, in order to secure the representation that had never been afforded by those who had presumed to speak for our people, but never to our people. Yes, that would indeed involve doing deals with the Conservatives. We could not possibly get less out of them than we had ever managed to get out of the Keir Starmers of the world. The strikes will conclude with the proof of that point. In contrast to Labour's intransigence, the workers in struggle will at least get something out of the Government. Sooner the bosses than the scabs.

A stone's throw from a superb secular comprehensive and not far from a very good Catholic one, the fairly modest commercial school that the Church of England maintains near me charges a termly fee for a day pupil of £4,906 or £5,598 depending on the year, plus a compulsory £266 per term for lunch. Three times every year. No one is scrimping and saving to find that kind of money. You either have it, or you do not.

Those who do, are not members of "the suburban middle class", much less of something called "the conservative middle class", which by any definition of conservatism that Peter Hitchens would accept does not exist. Only six per cent of pupils attend such schools, as is hardly surprising at those prices, so say it again that their parents are not in the middle of anything. They have not "made major sacrifices" such as going without "big houses, holidays and expensive cars and clothes".

Hitchens has hinted in the past that he was a dissatisfied customer of commercial schools. I expect that that was because they taught what most haute bourgeois parents wanted. Hitchens thinks that Starmer's Pabloism would frighten those people if they knew about it as some of us always have, but it is only the theoretical systematisation of their own opinions. Starmer is one of them to the core, and his so-called Red-Greenery would strike them as "moderate" and "centrist", if rather highfalutin in its articulation of what was "just common sense". It is fully compatible with the Trussonomics that, having even so much as pretended to oppose only one measure in the abandoned mini-Budget, Labour alone will go into the next General Election continuing to advocate. "The conservative middle class," indeed.

Hitchens's zeal for grammar schools seems to stem from his distaste at such teaching. But it is laughable to suggest that public or professional life in the Britain of the decades between the Butler Act and comprehensivisation was less public school dominated than it is in the present day. Contrary to what is often assumed, Margaret Thatcher did not go to a state grammar school. John Major failed at his. The only academically successful products of selective state education to have become Prime Minister have been Harold Wilson, Ted Heath and Gordon Brown, and Brown never won a General Election. He was beaten by an Old Etonian. They have the connections. You could have a grammar school in every town, but that would still be true.

There still are grammar schools, with far more pupils than Eton, Jeremy Hunt's Charterhouse and Rishi Sunak's Winchester put together. Where are their products? They may get into Oxbridge, but then what? As for who did not get into Oxbridge these days, commercial schools are often still using the largely coursework-based IGCSE, which has been banned in the state-funded sector because it is too easy, and the marks from which, unlike from A-level, pupils already have when they apply to universities. Always view those schools' stellar results in that light. Clearly, Oxford and Cambridge do.

Hitchens is far behind the curve on Tony Blair's Westminster tutors for his two elder sons, but everyone on the Left knows that nothing in Britain is treated as really having happened until it has appeared either in the Tory papers or on the BBC. Private tutoring would go on whatever state education arrangements were in place, as it always has. Grammar schools did nothing about that, they still do not where they still exist, and they never would anywhere. Indeed, the existence of the 11-plus has always actively encouraged the tutoring industry.

Most egregiously, Hitchens extrapolates from a handful of extremely unusual London institutions to suggest that a state secondary school's location told you anything about it. I spent seven years as a pupil and eight as a governor of a comprehensive school, not one of those referred to above. It was in the most affluent part of its catchment area, but that said nothing at all about the place, as it still does not.

Let me take you back 30 years, to the beginning of September 1992, three weeks short of my fifteenth birthday. The most inexplicable governor had been appointed to my school. To this day, no one will own up to having had any part in that appointment. I was not yet a member of any party, but I was becoming active politically, and in between more pressing matters, the local Labour operation was vaguely planning to bring me in. Entirely unknown to me, the decision was made that I would at some future time be an acceptable governor, in stark contrast to the one who had just assumed office. I repeat that I was not quite 15 and had no idea that any of this was happening.

Fast forward to the Golden Britpop Summer of 1995. School was at its wit's end, and by then what in those days could in these parts still call itself "the party" wanted to exercise the County Council's power of recall and instead install me with effect from 23rd September, my eighteenth birthday. That would have made me a governor for almost the whole of my Upper Sixth, so school understandably put the kibosh on it, although on the clear understanding that it did want me as soon as was quite decent.

A year later, when the problem governor's term would have been up, then school and the party were aligned and allied in my favour, but the distant Diocese was unconvinced, since at that point I was still the only person who did not know that I was eventually going to go over to Rome. The day had yet to come when the late Bishop Kevin Dunn would promise to initiate my candidacy for this largely Catholic parliamentary seat by publicly anointing me. When I suggested accompaniment by Zadok the Priest, then he replied, "Why not?" He was not joking. Requiescat in pace.

Therefore, I did not become a governor a fortnight after my A-level results, and three weeks shy of my nineteenth birthday. But four years later, I had already been a governor of a primary school for the first of eight years, and I had been safely aboard the Barque of Saint Peter for a year. When I had written to school to request prayers upon my reception, then it had offered a Mass of Thanksgiving. Yes, really. It was the usual weekly Mass, but it was said for that intention. I got a card. The funny governor's days were numbered, and no third term was awarded in 2000. Instead, I came into my inheritance at last.

I keep being told that I ought to be brought back, but that is unlikely to happen in the near future, although the Council no longer has any role in the matter, it is anyway no longer under Labour control, and the Diocese has already caused any problem at that end to disappear into thin air. I am terribly flattered, of course, and I have never stopped knowing a lot of what went on. Yes, I do mean never.

The present Governing Body is perhaps a unique concentration of my parliamentary voters; they account for at least a large minority of it. A recent reappointment, after a break of some years, had in the meantime signed my nomination papers at the last General Election. More than one member was a character witness at my sentencing. So never say never, but not for quite a while yet.

Seven years as a pupil there had made me broadly aware that little or nothing could be gleaned from a comprehensive school's relatively fancy postal address, and eight years as a governor gave me a thoroughly detailed appreciation of that fact. People who lack even the former knowledge have little or no experience of the matter, and therefore ought not to pass comment on it.